


At the Speed of Light

by JustAPassingGlance



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:38:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6795136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAPassingGlance/pseuds/JustAPassingGlance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At eleven, Blaine's belief in happiness-in his tomorrow- was starting to wane. But it was there, somewhere just up the road. Waiting for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the Speed of Light

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow this was directly inspired by Kesha's Animal.  
> I don't really know exactly how but its definitely there.

_Close your eyes._

_Count to three **.**_

Blaine was eleven and hadn’t yet been told that it gets better. Perhaps that was because no one believed it. Perhaps it was because anyone who might have didn’t know that he needed to hear it. 

He would have wanted to believe it, wanted it more than anything. Maybe even wanted it so hard that he let himself pretend to believe.

He probably wouldn’t have actually believed it though, not while he was toiling in the depths of so much hurt and confusion.

But it was something he would have wanted to hear.

 _Close your eyes_.

Everything hadn’t yet come together—the final amalgamation, the culmination. The jeers and fists of his classmates. The stilted conversations with his father that dragged their way through forced bonding activities—but the pieces were falling all around him. He could feel it in his bones, just like his grandfather could feel the changes in the weather, could predict a summer rainstorm before there was even a cloud in the sky.

It started as subtle shifts, once-friends distancing themselves a little. Whispers in the hallway that followed him but never confronted him. His father’s stare, now a little harder and calculating. Wary, almost.

But also almost nothing.

Even the lines around his mother’s mouth were starting to become tighter. They pursed together as her head gave an imperceptible shake, stopping Blaine’s mouth in its tracks as he happily babbled about his best friend, Tommy.

He wasn’t the only one who was figuring things out. All around him, everyone else was too.

_Count to three._

At first he hadn’t really understood.

The world, he had been told, was made up of a patchwork quilt of people. Everyone and all their differences came together to make the world a better, stronger, and more beautiful place.

Only now was he starting to understand.

Differences were good.

But only if they were the right ones.

His patch on the quilt was flawed. Maybe it was once beautiful but someone had spilt on it, or it had been left in front of the heater and now it was burned. Best to keep it out of sight, folded up and placed underneath the rest or, better yet, cut out entirely.

His difference was not one of the good ones.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Non-existent.

Like everyone, even his family, seemed to somehow wish he was.

_Close your eyes._

He closed his eyes.

He counted to three.

He wished for it to end.

All of it.

Not _end_ end. Not in the way that Henry Johnson would later hint that it should end. Not in that way in which he should end it for himself.

He just wanted it to be over. He wanted to be on the other side of things

Even if there was no one to tell him that it would get better. Even if Annie had been lying to him all of his life by telling him that the sun would come out tomorrow.

He was ready for his tomorrow.

_Close your eyes._

* * *

 

His feet tripped over each other. He stumbled and pitched forward, the ground rising up to meet him.

He felt unfamiliar in himself. Like those moments when you first wake up but your mind is still asleep, still coming back to itself, and for a moment you’re still waiting to be you. His limbs felt too long, the muscles of his body no longer stringy, but tighter and compact. Developed. He still felt like him, just somehow different. Somehow not really him.

He was a him he had yet to become.

Blaine never finished the fall, the hand that was urgently tugging him along caught him. Kept him up. Kept him running forward, even as his feet continued to fumble and search for their bearings.

“Where are we going?” He panted. His grip tightened and, despite not knowing what was happening, he felt breathless laughter bubbling up in his chest. Laughter that spilled and burst out through his lips.

“Come on,” a voice urged.   

“Slow down.” He tugged back on the other hand. Like holding that hand and communicating through it was the most natural thing in the world. 

It _was_ the most natural thing in the world. Everything about the moment was the most natural thing in the world.

They slowed and stopped, laughing in tandem as they caught their breath.

“We won!” someone up ahead crowed.

“Suck it, Sebastain!” A different voice called back in a good natured taunt before breaking into a chorus of _We Are the Champions._

In the distance a bonfire flickered and Blaine could just barely make out a group of people crowded around it. 

“Guess we lost that race,” Sebastian murmured, his fingers still curled tightly around Blaine’s. “And he’s never going to let us live this down.”

“We never had a chance,” Blaine hazarded, judging by the distance between them and their competitors.

He still wasn’t sure of anything. His mind still swirled, trying to make sense of his surroundings. He had just been a eleven-year-old boy in his room. He was supposed to have been doing his homework but instead he had been surreptitiously watching television.

Surreptitious had been a vocabulary word he had learned last week and he still wasn’t entirely sure how to spell it. _Ser-rup-titous_ , he would have guessed with the sinking feeling that he was probably wrong.

But the more he thought about it, the further away that memory became. He couldn’t recall what he had been working on, even though he was sure it was somehow important.

Even as those memories fell back, he felt new ones rushing in, taking their place and filling in the years in between. They were fuzzier than real memories. Memories padded by gauze, like when you tried to remember a dream and the reality of the moments was always just dancing out of reach.

He took a deep breath and used Sebastian’s eyes to ground himself in the present. When he was in high school he had (would have? Did have?) a therapist tell him that one of his problems was that he could cling too tightly to the past.

And how many times, he wondered, over the years had he found himself doing the same thing? All those moments when he was on the brink of panic, filled with uncertainty and confusion, and all he had to do was look into Sebastian’s eyes and he felt himself even out.

“Come on,” Sebastian said again, this time pulling Blaine off to the right instead of straight ahead.

Blaine hesitated, looking back at their friends and feeling like they should join them but wanting to follow Sebastian wherever it was that he wanted to go.  

“I guess we’ll have at least an hour before they miss us too much,” he replied and he let Sebastian lead him through the woods. To the left, he could hear the river. In the distance, their friends continued to sing, snippets drifting less and less clearly the further they walked.  

“Just over there.” Sebastian pointed to an area off the path they have been following. “Jeff and I found it while we were hiking earlier today.”

Expertly, Sebastian picked his way over rocks and tree roots. Blaine made sure to follow in his footsteps exactly, knowing anywhere that Sebastian's feet fit his would as well.  After another few minutes of walking, they came to a clearing.

“It’s so beautiful out here,” Blaine breathed out.

The clearing wasn’t very big, less than six feet in all directions. Dirt gave way to pebbles which, in turn, gave way to the river. At the water’s edge there were two boulders, the largest one almost as tall as Blaine. Then sun had mostly set and the darkening sky was streaked with purples and oranges with the first stars beginning to break through the twilight.

“I guess nature isn’t always a terrible thing,” Sebastian conceded.

Blaine walked to the edge of the water and for a long moment he just stood there, staring up at the sky and across the river to the other bank. He had never quite enjoyed camping trips as much as his dad and brother had but he had never been shy in his appreciation of beauty.

After a few minutes, Sebastian gestured to the boulders and helped Blaine up onto the nearest one before climbing up after him. Blaine scooted to the far side, making sure there was enough room for Sebastian. The rock was big enough for them to comfortable sit side by side.

Even in the cooling air, the top was still sun-warmed. Between that and body heat he could feel emanating from Sebastian, Blaine could never remember feeling so perfectly content in his life.

Suddenly, Blaine felt bashful. The eleven-year-old him had never been alone with a boy before, especially not one as handsome as Sebastian. And definitely not one who looked at him the way Sebastian did, with every look whispering volumes of love and affection.

“Can I-” Blaine started to ask before stopping himself. Instead, he tentatively reached his hand out to Sebastian’s. He liked the way their hands felt together; Sebastian’s larger fingers entwined with his. The contrast of the Sebastian’s roughened callouses with the smooth softness of the back of his hand. “I like this,” he said softly, mostly to himself.

Sebastian looked questioningly at him. “I like this too.”

“Sorry.” Blaine shook his head. “It’s just… I’m so happy. With you. With myself. Things turned out okay. I get my happiness.”

Sebastian moved closer, letting go of Blaine’s hand so he could wrap his arm around him. Gently, he tugged Blaine down so Blaine’s head was pillowed on his chest and pressed a kiss against his temple.

“When I was a kid there were days when I never thought that I would ever feel this way. I guess we all felt like that—all the gay kids growing up in the middle of nowhere. It took so long for me to realize that none of that was true, even longer than I think most people realize. In high school everyone thought I had everything together when a lot of the time I was just pretending so I could be the person everyone thought I was. Or the person that I wanted to be.”

Sebastian’s grip around him tightened as Blaine’s breath hitched in his chest.  

“It feels like yesterday,” Blaine continued, laughing to himself, “when I was in middle school, thinking that this could never be my life and that people like us could never have this. That all we could ever be was unhappy and, worse, that our unhappiness was deserved.

But we’re here. And we deserve this just as much as anyone else does. And I’m so happy. I really, truly am.”

“Blaine. Fuck. Fuck, I love you.”

“I love you too,” He said both for the first time and the millionth time and he could feel his heart swelling with each word he spoke. He twisted around so he could look up at Sebastian and all it took was one glance into those green eyes for him to feel anchored again.

“So happy,” Blaine repeated.

“I just came here to make out,” Sebastian joked weakly, still holding tightly onto Blaine.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to that either.”

Blaine angled his head up and closed his eyes. He couldn’t help but shiver as Sebastian’s lips brushed against his own.

* * *

 

_Count to three._

Blaine opened his eyes again. Suddenly he was feeling terribly small, shrunk back in on himself.

His mother was at his door, asking him if his homework was done because dinner would be ready in 10 minutes.

He had a test in Social Studies the next day and a report due in Spanish. He would have to stand in front of his whole class and give it while they whispered behind their hands. Then there would be lunch, where he would sit with the other kids who liked to do the school musicals.

There was a football game over at the high school on Thursday. He hadn’t been thinking of going to it but maybe he would after all. Tommy and some of their other friends always went and it had been a while since he spent any real time with them. Lately he had been so caught up in his own head, his own insecurities, that he hadn’t been making time for others like he should have.

Middle school was always going to be middle school. And there was high school after that. Things wouldn’t always be easy, for him or for anyone else. Things wouldn’t just get better overnight. And there would be times ahead, he was sure, that would be worse.

But he would gather the good things to him, in bits and pieces and chunks whenever they came by. He had his family and his friends. And sometime, years from now, he would have Sebastian.

His tomorrow was out there, just waiting for him.  


End file.
